Java News from Saturday, April 30, 2005

Several members of the Ant team privately commented on yesterday's news item about Ant 1.6.3. They made the usual batch of suggestions, and pointed me to the same FAQ entries I'd already read. None of them attempted to explain why the same junit task worked fine with Ant 1.5.4 and not at all in Ant 1.6.3. Possibly, all the different permutations I've tried of adding junit.jar to ANT_HOME/lib, the static classpath, and/or an Ant classpath element have managed to miss the one magic combination that would make Ant work; but if it really is that complex, then that very complexity is a bug. I thought some people might like an opportunity to comment on this publicly so I've posted an expanded version of my comments on the Cafes. Even if you're not struggling with Ant yourself, I think the notes on how not to write an error message are relevant to programmers on any platform in any language.